Enjoy jaunty post-apocalypse dune-surfing in free-to-play Tray Racers
Coming next year. Tubular!
Revealed at the Future Games Show tonight, Tray Racers is a game clearly derived from a dev accidentally doing a spoonerism in a meeting one time. This SEO nightmare is being developed by Bit Loom, the team behind colourful yet somehow unsettling puzzle game Phogs, and it's about racing down sand dunes on trays. As the trailer says, "the world ended... But the fun didn’t!", and I guess winning a dune race would take your mind off the unending horror for a bit.
This bad boy is going to be free-to-play at launch in 2023, and has multiplayer for up to 16 players to zoom through randomly generated desert tracks. You can also customise your racer with cool threads, hair, and custom sprays for your tray. Which is all screaming "Fall Guys is very successful!" to me. I have no word yet on how Tray Racers might be monetised, but it's aimed at all the family and certainly feels more wholesome than Fall Guys, which now feels somehow grubby and that I generally associate with words like "chungus".
Tray Racers does actually look pretty cute, though, and though I'm always a bit wary of randomly generated racetracks it sounds like there could be some cool things in the mix. The Steam store page is selling "weird and wonderful vistas, hazards, creatures, and surprises from a mix of bizarre & beautiful post-apocalyptic biomes," so while this is admittedly mostly sand-based there are also "bouncy cactus forests", critters, buried cities, and "sustainable solarpunk settlements". This is, in fairness, a lot more active than I would be after the end of the world.
Not E3 2022 is in full-swing - see everything in our E3 2022 hub, as well as our complete round-up of everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2022. Many more big game showcases and streams are still to come this summer, so make sure you stay up to date with our summer games stream schedule.